


Sick Day

by Figure_of_Dismay



Category: The Good Place (TV)
Genre: F/M, Fluff, Sickfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-15
Updated: 2018-04-15
Packaged: 2019-04-23 00:59:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,382
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14321052
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Figure_of_Dismay/pseuds/Figure_of_Dismay
Summary: “I’m dying,” said Michael, wailed, she might have said, only with his head draped with  a towel and bent over a bowl of hot, lemony water billowing steam, it was understandably hard to tell.“You’re not dying,” said Eleanor sensibly, “You’re immortal. And even if you weren’t it’s just a little cold or something.”"Icouldbe dying, you don't know."





	Sick Day

**Author's Note:**

> with great thanks to @silver-boots for proofing help!
> 
> So @inkywisps and i have been talking about headcanons re: quiet intimacies of the michael/eleanor variety and then I saw that @sam-beckett is feeling poorly, so this popped into my head. So this bit of unabashed fluff goes out to the two of you <333

“I’m dying,” said Michael, wailed, she might have said, only with his head draped with a towel and bent over a bowl of hot, lemony water billowing steam, it was understandably hard to tell.

“You’re not dying,” said Eleanor sensibly, “You’re immortal. And even if you weren’t it’s just a little cold or something.”

“I _could_ be dying, you don’t know,” he said, sitting up. “My kind almost never get sick, if my near perfect immune system has failed me, there’s no telling what could happen.” His face was red but his hair was surprisingly unruffled. Improbable demon super powers, she decided, along with the looking not-totally-disgusting while apparently also feeling pretty sure he was just about to kick off this immortal coil. 

“Or else you’re a giant, towering hypochondriac,” she countered, taking a seat in front of the desk. If the dude felt so rotten, why didn’t consider not going into the office, for once? Surly the neighborhood wouldn’t fall apart. He spent plenty of time away at Chidi’s lessons, as well as…. various other pursuits. 

“Damn that Trevor, dropping by just to annoy me and letting his snotty minions sneeze on my things without telling me!” Michael tugged the towel off his neck and dropped it to the desk with an unusual lack of flair. 

Eleanor decided she had no interest in investigating how literally he meant ‘snotty.’ She watched as Michael slumped listlessly in his chair and managed to look forlorn and annoyed at the same time. 

Eleanor didn’t really do ‘sick boyfriend.’ To be honest, sick people made her panicky and short tempered. She didn’t have a caretaking bone in her body, she figured. She didn’t like it the other way around either, really. One of the biggest fights she ever had with Matt the EMT was when she had fever and a chest cold and he kept bringing her flowers and tea and trying to give her backrubs, and she’d freaked out, hemmed in, trapped and defenseless. She’d accused him of trying to get sex or win points while she was miserable, and Matt had not taken it well. He’d nursed his wounded pride and called her a stingy accountant of quid pro quos. No, on the whole sick-while-dating was not for her.

Michael looked really unhappy though and it was bumming her out. “Maybe you should go lie down,” she suggested, “try to sleep it off. Actually, do you even have a bed somewhere? Cause you know, you’ve never shown us your house… if you even have one. Wait, do you live in your office, Michael?”

That would explain why they were always at her place, in spite of the clowns. They both hated the clowns. Michael didn’t really have a ‘his place,’ did he. It might look really weird to Vicky if he wanted one, though. She wondered if it had been the same on previous reboots, and then decided she really didn’t want to think about previous reboots right at that moment, or possibly ever if she could help it. 

“It’s usually all I need,” he said. She couldn’t tell if the edge to his tone was congestion or defensiveness. “We don’t require rest with the same frequency that humans do. I am not a helpless slave to a circadian rhythm.”

“Well, buddy, I hate to say this, but you are sounding pretty cranky there. Like somebody who needs a nap. And maybe a couple demon tylenol.”

“I told you, demon is a-- oh, what’s the point.” 

“Have you ever been sick before?” she asked, genuinely curious. Whatever the hell Michael was was pretty mysterios.

“Not in centuries, millennia even. Not since i first learned to manifest in my present form,” said Michael. He flopped a hand to indicate himself, rumple-suited, tie undone and pouting. And yep, that was definitely whining. Eleanor got the impression that however many centuries he’d been around, he hadn’t done a lot of actual living with that…. manifestation. Yikes. She usually tried not to think about that kind of baggage when doing the ‘hanging out with Michael and sometimes having sex’ thing. The superbeing part was a head trip.

“Well, you didn’t die then, did you,” she coaxed.

“No,” Michael admitted, although it sounded more like “dough.” He sneezed then, an improbably tiny cat’s sneeze. Eleanor stifled the urge to laugh. The truth was that woeful, sick little boy Michael was surprisingly adorable, but telling him that would probably either inflate his ego even more or make him even crankier. 

“When I was little and got stay home from school sick, my mom would leave a can of chicken and stars soup out on the table for me to microwave while she was at work, and tell me specifically I could use the curly cocktail straws for my juice or whatever. And I would watch all the soap operas or cartoons, with no one to bug me…” she trailed off, and realized from Michael’s sad little smile that maybe that wasn’t the cutest story. “Do you like cartoons? That’s the best sick day cure. Do we get Loony Toons in here?”

“Sure,” he said, “The cartoon depictions of animal cruelty, you know. But I’m not sure I see the appeal. They’re so repetitive.”

She did laugh at him that time, fondly incredulous. “Do you see the irony in that, dude? Because that is a lot of irony.”

“Of course I do, Eleanor, I’m feverish not blind. Why do you suppose I dislike it? No one could enjoy seeing their own fate mocked by cartoon animals.” He leaned forward against his desk and put his face in his hands. It was unclear if this was a further statement on the subject, or general malaise. Either way, it was time to move on.

Eleanor came around the desk, grabbed one Michael’s arms and tugged upwards, trying to get him on his feet. This was as effective as it usually was, which was to say, not at all, but it got his attention. She did the forehead-hand thing that parents and spouses did on tv shows and decided that he did feel warm, though thankfully not sticky-sweaty or anything. Then she patted the top of his hair, like an idiot, because she usually wanted to and he was too tall under most circumstances. 

“What is going on here, exactly?” Michael asked, genuinely confused, but he kind of leaned his shoulder against her stomach and continued being slumped so she figured he didn’t much care.

“Come on, big guy,” she said, finding herself smiling and indulgent, “Do the snappy thingy and take us to the clown house.”

“Why?”

“I told you, you should try to sleep it off, and apparently unless you can sleep upside in your broom closet like a bat, you’ve go nowhere to do that here.”

“It’s not a hangover, Eleanor,” he complained. 

He snapped them away anyway, though, to the loft platform and let her tow him by the wrist bed-wards. He also sat down obediently and shucked his jacket on command. She tossed it somewhere towards the foot of the bed and paused. She’d noticed before that Michael sitting on the edge of her bed and her standing in front of him put them nicely at eye-to-eye level. All of those befores were under very different bedroom circumstances, but it was still nice. Very nice actually, with Michael looking at her all indulgent and dopey-drowsy, his long hands resting on his knees.

“If this is some kind of ploy to have your wicked way with me while my defenses are down, I have to say i’m not exactly…” he said, and faded into a noise of complaint, which faded into a quiet groany kind of wettish cough, which he made a vaguely panicky face about. Not good. Kind of icky sick people sounding, but also, yeah he was not faking this to get attention. One important thing to know about Michael was that he didn’t ever voluntarily make himself feel miserable in order to play mind games. She’d figured out that it happened accidentally kind of a lot -- which was only fair -- but he never did it on purpose.

“I hate to break it to you, but germ-sharing does less than nothing for me so that’s a hard pass. Relax,” she insisted. She rubbed his shoulders lightly, gently, fingers crinkling crisp oxford cloth in hopefully soothing moves. She’d always liked guy-shoulders in oxford shirts, and that had not changed. Michael stared at her curiously from under heavy lids. His face looked pretty flushed. She considered that she was sending mixed signals so she stepped back. “And lie down, naps don’t count sitting up. And don’t tell me that you guys don’t sleep again, because I personally have seen you sleeping, so.”

Michael opened his mouth to protest, but apparently thought better of it and gave in gracefully. Or awkwardly-gracefully, clambering his long limbs backward until he lay full out on her bed with his head on her pillow and his hands at his sides in comically perfect repose, like a half intentional parody or textbook depiction of ‘a man sleeping.’ She never really forgot that Michael wasn’t human, but the ways it stood out in the smaller details of him still often took her by surprise. Then he shifted sideways slightly and draped his arm across his face, and he looked altogether human, sprawled and tired and headachy, and something in her chest squeezed. 

“I don’t have chicken-and-stars,” she said, soft and hesitant, “but I think there’s some peppermint tea in the cupboard, if you want.”

“Eleanor, it’s alright,” he said. His voice was low and hoarse. He seemed to be past the theatrical complaints phase of illness and into the just let me lie here phase. Maybe that was progress. She had a momentary chilling, sinking feeling, wondering if there maybe was something to worry about if he could and had fallen ill. Could he really be in danger? But no, if he was really worried he’d be spooling plans in her ear, calling Janet, instructing her on how to deal with Vicky. This was just a mean Trevor prank, a crummy sick day. She stared at Michael and decided that was fact, knew that it was.

He lifted his arm and peered over at her, still standing indecisively beside the bed. “Well,” he said, “aren’t you going to join me? This was your idea after all.”

“I… I could, if you wanted,” she said, uncertain. It was true, she didn’t really do sick friend, sick boyfriend, snoring bedmate, close quarters comfort that was nothing but patience and presence and touch. She hadn’t anyway, back on earth. It was also true that she and Michael hadn’t sought simple rest or intimacy together that way except as followed the most intense of their couplings. Eleanor was never sure if that was something they both engineered or if it was one or the other of them, or if it was just chance. In some ways they had the barest scrim of a relationship, though she knew in other ways very much the opposite was true. Big scary ways. And knowing Michael, he wouldn’t ask just to humor her, right?

“Would it help if I assured you that, uh, demon germs cannot infect humans?” he asked, teasing, but also, yeah there was that little boy pout again, an expression undignified enough he couldn’t have been doing it consciously which made it all the more impossible to refuse.

She laughed, giving in. “Alright, sure,” she said, “You know me, I’m always down for extra sleep.” Michael gave her a skeptical ‘sure that’s all it is,’ look but wisely didn’t argue the point when he was getting what he wanted.

She went around the other side of the bed and got rid of her shoes, and then after a scornful thought at her hesitation, she got rid of her jeans, too. They weren’t exactly strangers. She’d sort of accidentally put Michael on her usual side of the bed, and so she felt the usual funny sense of mirror displacement as she climbed slowly under the covers. Michael watched her with a strange, serious, curious look on his face, the tilt of his chin, the curl of his hand against the pillow all held still in the act of observing her. Then his concentration broke into quiet coughing and she rubbed his arm lightly until he stilled, a surprisingly instinctive gesture.

“Well, you’re not dying, but it’s still no fun, huh,” she said.

“I don’t know how you live with those vulnerable little human bodies and your cold and flu season and swine-bird whatever epidemics.” Michael brought his arm down and worked at his collar, opening shirt buttons to breathe easier, move easier.

“I dunno,” she said thoughtfully, “It’s not like it gets nicer being sick, but by the time you’re a grownup it’s not scary and new anymore. Just a pain. And sometimes you even if you’re sick you can still enjoy your day off from work, eat junk food, or do absolutely nothing and no one can tell you to feel bad about it. It’s like… annoying but normal.” 

“Like a guilty pleasure,” said Michael.

Eleanor slid down and rolled automatically towards his weight on the mattress, wedged into the comforter, he above, she below. It should have been claustrophobic but it wasn’t. She turned to face away from Michael and reached back to tug at his wrist until he turned too, curling behind her. When they had first begun, these moves, these signals would have required her explain, talk him through it, and now they did not. He let his arm drape across her waist. She took his arm again and unbuttoned his cuff, seeing it pulled uncomfortably taut against his skin, and also curious how much casually encroaching on his person he would allow. A lot, it seemed like, lately. He took one of her hands in his when she was done. 

He said her name, once, quietly, like an idea, or a conclusion, and tucked her under his chin. The clown house was always a little too cold. She burrowed in, shuffling further into the bedclothes and back into Michael’s solid warmth, and listened to him beside her.


End file.
